Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

This simple idiom is understood by the youngest of school children. It has been around for centuries, so why do our financial institutions, retailers and cloud based service corporations continue to put all of our sensitive data in one basket!?

First things first. This idiom, Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket applies to you, the companies and businesses you interact with and do business with, the stores where you shop as well as the cloud(s) where you store your personal data and photographs and social networks you participate on.

Your data, their data, our shared existence on the Internet is vulnerable. No person, business, corporation, utility or government is immune or impervious to hacking. One thing we should all know by now it that today your financial institution could be hacked and next month your it’s your co-worker or neighbor’s bank or transaction.

It seems simple enough that if Target, Sony, Bank of America and other major businesses sites get hacked, they are not just getting a fraction of user’s data, they are getting all of their user’s data.

Check out Entrepreneur.com’s 8 of the Biggest Data Breaches Ever and How They Happened (Infographic) – it’s all pictures, so no heavy reading is required.

I don’t think the government needs to always step in and tell corporations how to conduct their businesses, but when it comes to protecting customer data, I think we need the government to step in and create some “best practices” for businesses, our data and their corporate and employee data.

Best Practices for Business

• Do not place all your customer data behind one firewall
• Do not place all customer data on one server cluster
• Limit credit card and payment processing from one vendor to a percentage of your business
• Limit the data shared back to third-party creditors, financial institutions, marketing services
• Split customer data into logical or random packets to assure that if data is stolen, it can’t be used in whole or in part by the hackers

If all businesses, corporations and governments implemented just one of the above Best Practices, it would go a long way to protecting our sensitive customer information.

In fact if these, the most simple and most basic of practices isn’t followed, the same insurance companies who have been bailing out these businesses after each credit card breach, each server hack, or just plain old corporate arrogance and stupidity should stop taking policies which are not in good faith being protected to begin with.

What can you and I do as consumers?

We can tell let the businesses we currently do business with, that we take these breaches seriously and expect that they will change the way they conduct business, store our personal and financial data and when breached, they will respond with full disclosure to the public and support the breached users and businesses with safeguards and protections.

We can also do what we can to place our own eggs in more than one basket.

• Diversify your banking to two or more financial institutions
• Use different email aliases for correspondence and online shopping, another for your user login name, etc.
• Use one password for social networks, another for banking and another for work, and so on
• Change one or more of your passwords or email aliases after a busy shopping seasons such as Christmas, or after returning from a vacation

Let’s face it, most people re-use the same username, email and password over and over again. Many do not change this information for years at a time – if ever.

By utilizing the email “Alias” provided by nearly all email hosting services, such as Outlook.com, Exchange, Google, Yahoo!, etc you can have one email Inbox for all your incoming email, but use a give out different email addresses (aliases) to different services and businesses you do business with.

This way if one hacked and your data has been breached, you only need to discontinue using the breached alias and give the new updated alias to a fraction of sites and services.

Four is a good number of aliases people should consider

Red: High security sites such as banking, financial, credit cards, Bill Pay

Orange: Online retailers and Utilities such as Amazon, Target, Best Buy, NewEgg, PG&E, AT&T, Comcast

Yellow: Minimal security for cloud services, non-financial social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, or political campaigns, charities…. Yellow should also be used for mailing lists

Green: General correspondence to trusted family and friends

Your Bank gets hacked, just change your email address yourname-red@service.com to yourname-red2@service.com and password for all “Red” accounts.

Say you start receiving lots of spam on your Orange Alias – change the email alias and password for only those sites. This way the spam goes to a non-working/cancelled Orange Alias and your new correspondence goes your updated Orange Alias.

Apply the same four color rule to your usernames and login for different sites and if your social network gets hacked and your data is stolen, the people who now have your information can’t use it access your bank or credit cards.

Grade Schoool

Remember, not putting all your eggs in one basket is something that we learn in grade school. This most basic of principles to protect oneself should not be forgotten once we turn 18, or our income skyrockets. We should all diversify and we should all demand that the businesses we trust with our business also follow this simple rule.

Apple:s Strength isn’t by being Everything to Everyone

Look, should platform keyboards see upgrades and improvements over the life of a product – sure, but Apple shouldn’t open up their platform for 3rd party keyboards.
iOS’ heart and soul begins and ends.with it’s interface and the keyboard is a very large party of that experience. Swapping out the Apple keyboard for Swype would take away a large part of why iOS is, well, iOS.
One of Android’s biggest problems is the lack of consultancy between oems, mobile operators and users. No one phone operates in a consistent manor – even shutting down the phone is inconsistent.
no, there are things Apple needs to remain firm on, and keeping a consistent keyboard that is a close 2nd beat to the Windows Phone should remain under Apples control.

Deeper integration will come, bit not like it is on the Windows Platform. No, Apple will develope key technologies, many on the cloud which will be able tonve accessed and shared across Apple platforms; maybe they will share a name, but the app will be different for iOS and Mac OS – my guess is that we will see the two Os platforms merge for version iOS 10.

So, expect to see more messaging, chat and video apps which cross between the handheld, television and desktop.

will Apple improve their camera’s features? I’m sure it will, but I’m not convinced they will add features such as full HD video and capture still photos at the same time. To do that right, Apple would have to have some new photo hardware and I just haven’t seen Apple focus too much on photographs.
I think Apple will come out with an iCamera or iDSLR before a major overall to their iPhone or iPad camera – DSLR running iOS? It could happen.

And to respond to the writers wish for cross messaging between iOS, and AIM, I think that ship has sailed. I would more likely expect iOS to embrace a Windows Phone model of messaging and have both SMS, mms, iMessage and the like to feed through Apple servers and communicate with the messaging services at Facebook.

Well, in 30m to 1h we’ll know a lot more.

I’m expecting evolution from Apple this Season, not a revolution.

Ebgadget iOS6 Wishlist

The Problems with a Facebook Phone

So, the rumors have begun again and I’m talking about a/the “Facebook Phone” – So, how should Facebook go about creating a new phone? I see three possibilities.

1. Base the phone on Android and be able to tap into the hundreds of thousands of Android Apps.

The problem with this scenario is that the Android market is very fragmented and now we have Playstation certifications, 600Mhz single core, dual-core and quad-core systems, 5 resolutions and many other factors, one being that Google now owns Motorola and plans to continue to develop phones and other Android products as a separate division.

2. This solution would be to leverage Android’s relationship with Amazon and it’s Kindle or Sony and it’s Playstation certification.

Could Facebook team up with either or both of these vendors and create a platform where they could share in the revenue stream and still push users towards their products and services? Gaming, Books and Social?  This could work if all three played well together, but these types of relationships often breakdown as one player starts to dominate the platform.

3. The last solution, and I think the best solution, should Facebook create their own phone, would be for them to license Windows Phone 8, leverage everything that Windows Phone 7.5 has in relation to Facebook integration as well as be able to grow it using Microsoft’s open platform.

Microsoft has a mixed history of building in 3rd party tech into their products and then after a generation or two implements their own tech and pushed aside the initial 3rd party. This was done in the past on some very basic platform specific techs such as file compression and the like.

But as far as open platforms go, Microsoft has had and continues to have the most open living platform in the history of Operating Systems, heck, before Microsoft, there were no open platforms! 😮

The new Microsoft has all the components needed to create a killer open platform for Facebook. Facebook could sell their specialized phones, with, I don’t know, qwerety keyboard? or portrait display (wider keyboard) supplement the integrated Facebook offerings with their own tie-ins for advertising and marketing, 3rd parties would have a solid platform for creating apps for both phones, x86, x64 and ARM based systems with just on API from a company that know how to develop tools so that developers can create the best apps for generations to come.

Could Facebook still support Android, iOS and HTML browsers? SURE! They could actually support them better if they have one premier product that they could focus their efforts on developing and growing and then work on implementing those same features to the other platforms as they mature.  Right now it seems like Facebook has their hands in too many platforms and too many partnerships.

They have their programmers working with teams for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows App, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc. They should be focusing on one platform, or two – one mobile and one desktop HTML and then allow the existing teams working with the 3rd parties to implement to the best of their platform the features found in their latest Facebook Phone and Desktop software.

The day of the having a device for music, another for video, a third for office apps, another for gaming, social networks and yet another for the desktop is over.  People want one device or one platform that works seamlessly across 2 or 3 screens  – not a bag filled with devices.

So to summarize, iOS is too closed of an environment with no hope of royalty sharing, Android is a wild west with no one company leading their future, poor developer support and fragmented market, that leave Windows, Windows provides Facebook with all the best qualities from Apple, a strong API, direction and focus on the future, Goodle has the broad user base, but brings with it a lot of competition from too many directions, too many to support and would not allow Facebook to focus on growing and introducing new features, The Android, Sony and Amazon alliance also fails because they too suffer from all the same weaknesses of Android’s open platform and then they would have to work on releasing products and R&D on the same product cycles, compromise needs and while they would have the trinity of Social, Gaming and Books, they would not be united and none of those platforms have secure app stores so corporations would be less likely to allow such a device to work on their intranets, etc.

http://www.thetechlabs.com/tech-news/facebook-branded-phone-a-possibility/

 

Ex Apple Employees Designing the Facebook Phone?

Ok, I understand that Facebook feels they need to control their own mobile destiny, but hiring people from Apple to create your own phone isn’t necessarily a good idea.

Facebook needs to follow Microsoft with it revolutionary Metro design – yes, revolutionary.

Apple came up with a new UI for smartphones when it created the iPhone and at the time that phone’s OS was revolutionary.

Then came Android, webOS, Badu, etc – all of which borrow greatly from the iPhone.

Facebook needs a phone that is revolutionary just like the Windows Phone’s Metro interface.

Why do I say that? Because people are not going to jump platforms just for Facebook, it needs to be something different, fresh, cool.

If Facebook does design there own phone then it had better be incredible or it will not succeed in this already crowded phone market.

Facebook Phone Apple iPhone Engineers

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

Can your phone do this… YES

Ah, ya Google and Motorola, Windows Phone can do everything in your commercial and we can tag people in photos too – without opening an app.

Can Android do that? No. The End

ignorant droid with color for facebook commercial

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone